During emergency situations in buildings, evacuees can have difficulty finding safe egress routes out of the building. These difficulties can be an artifact of the condition creating the emergency such as earthquakes collapsing egress routes, or fire filling an egress route with smoke.
In conditions where it is difficult to find a safe way out of a building, indications as to which of the escape routes is/are safe, and indications of how to get to that escape route(s) can be very valuable. In more severe emergencies such as earthquakes, parts of the building may have collapsed. This severe damage can block the path to safe egress routes. Further, any changes in the building due to collapses can combine with smoke and dust to be very disorienting.
In a severe fire, the whole process of finding safe escape routes may become even more difficult if thick smoke fills the entire structure. In a severe fire, evacuee panic can combine with obscuration by heavy smoke to create severe disorientation in evacuees. These difficulties can be further aggravated if the fire spreads so rapidly that escape routes are blocked or cut off by the fire.
In conditions where it might be difficult to find a safe way out of a building, indications of where the safe egress routes are would be very helpful. On the other hand, first responders, especially fire fighters, often have considerable difficulty in navigating through buildings during an emergency. Fire fighters have a hard time seeing where they are, and where they can go when smoke is thick. Fire fighters often do not know the building layout well, don't have good directions for navigating toward an identified location, and often get lost. Fire fighters also often have a hard time finding multiple objectives such as the fire, standpipes, and suspected locations of victims, which all have to be found quickly.
Fire departments need to go to the fire when they arrive at a fire scene. Even if the location of the fire is known, this can be a challenging task due to lack of knowledge of the building layout. Fire fighters also need to know other locations they may need to travel to such as water supplies, victims, or special hazards.
Medical first responders are another group that might benefit from more building information. In outdoor incidents, they are almost always guided to the victim by people because the victim is being attended to by facility people or bystanders. This may not be the case with in-building incidents.
There are also security needs for pathfinding. Attack scenarios and hostage situations are possible in the future. Such scenarios could use pathfinding to help get security forces into the building.
There continues to be a need for solutions that help evacuees get out of the building, and help first responders, especially fire fighters get into a building, and to a location or locations where they need to be. Preferably such pathfinding systems can help them navigate into and through a building with a separate set of indicators than those used by the public.